The Best Sites For Social Media Marketing

How To Choose The Best Social Sites:

How To Choose The Best Sites For Social Media Marketing, will help you avoid making a difficult choice. Looking at adding or expanding your Business into a Social Site? A great Social Marketing strategy will deliver returns in the form of a growing audience and more Traffic & Leads, which you can convert to sales!

The Best Sites For Social Media Marketing – Bad Choice?

With Tons Of Social Sites, Which One Should You Pick?

Over all you will want to pick the site that is the best benefit for the audience from your own vision. Seems like a new Social Site, Social App or something “Social” pops up every month. Of all the billions of people online today more and more are on Social Sites. Did you know that in our world today there are more Cell Phone’s in use today than toothbrushes! With that in mind it may sound like your choice is more difficult than ever. The Top Sites may vary in other countries outside of the U.S. and among different languages but take a look at this U.S. data from Pew Research:

Social Media Marketing – Pew Research

If you go by this research you might decide that Facebook is the best choice but for some reason there is one leading Social Site missing from this table. Guess our research friends don’t view YouTube as a Social Site but it does provide a network for others to “connect” and be social, doesn’t it? Just for the sake of avoiding the argument, let’s include YouTube also.

So Which Social Site Is Best For You?

Personally I really believe that anyone getting started needs to combine your initial Social Strategy with the platform you are most comfortable with. First use the Social Site/Platform you’re most comfortable with and combine it with Facebook. Also you are going to include Facebook not because of it’s size alone but the Social Tools are among the best. Keep in mind that every Social Site requires a slightly different approach to successfully market on:

The Best Social Site For Marketing – facebook-icon

Facebook Social Media Marketing:

If you don’t currently use Facebook but plan on being a Marketer you want to get started by creating your profile on Facebook and then starting your very own Fan Page. Just do a Google Search for “Getting Started On Facebook” to create your profile page. You can also search YouTube for video on setting up your first Fan Page. I use these two tools to grow my reach & audience on FB, they save time and give you a unique advantage you wouldn’t have by marketing manually:

Fan Page Benefits include an Insights Page to see your posts data including audience makeup, and the best performing posts and the actions or engagements on them. You will also see the best engagement times for your posts and much more which is great data for you to take advantage of.

Auto Posting? A free service called PostPlanner allows you to schedule posts to your Fan Page and even provides content for you! Everything from viral content, inspirational quotes, quizzes, content to encourage user response and more for free! There is a Pro version of Post Planner that gives you much more but I recommend you use the free option first to get used to it and measure the results.

Pay Per Click! Set up an ad account to get your own ad campaigns going on one of the largest Social Platforms there is. Some restrictions and requirements will apply, the bottom line is that you are using their site and they can dictate how anyone uses it. Do not promote affiliate offers directly using your affiliate links on any platform. Provide value first and always, otherwise you may end up doing the affiliate dance of wonderment! That’s when you’re scratching you’re head wondering why your account is banned and how can you possibly get started again without making the same mistake.

Re-Marketing! Also known as Retargeting, Facebook allows users that have an Ads Account to create audiences with a bit of code (not as complicated as it sounds) so that you can “Retarget” those same customers again on Facebook even if your Ads are shown off of Facebook! That’s extra powerful stuff for Lead Generation!

Conversion Tracking! Whoa, Facebook even has a pixel (create in your Ad Manager) to track conversions for your campaigns too! This is big because in most cases tracking conversions is something you pay for with a tracking or link service. Using the tools available for conversions with Facebook is great for marketers who have never tracked their campaign numbers. Knowing your conversion numbers and having the data of how your leads are responding helps you to make your marketing better.

The Best Social Site For Marketing – youtube-icon

YouTube For Your Social Marketing:

In case you didn’t notice but videos didn’t used to show up in search results but they do now. Why? When most people search for a “how to” or “DIY” most will prefer watching a video of someone doing it than reading the explanation. Searches on YouTube rival the other top search engines, it’s a fact! Check this YouTube Marketing Guide on Kissmetrics if you haven’t set up an account. Not only can you use Google Adwords (or what ever it’s called today, sorry that’s a joke) with your video but you can also share video’s all over the Internet! YouTube video as a Social Tool has become so popular that the other leading Social Sites have either created a preference for video loaded directly onto their platforms or created their own video application! It only makes sense, would you want your customers leaving for another site just because of a video?

Right now video is the most powerful medium for marketing, networking and connecting. Video produces the most engagement over images & text (great text & images can rival video but it doesn’t happen for everyone or even always). On YouTube you can cultivate an audience just like on the other Social Platforms

Sharing Everywhere! It’s possible that being able to share YouTube video’s just about anywhere on the Internet is the biggest advantage there is. You can upload your video on YouTube and embed them on your other Social accounts and your WordPress sites too! Once a video is uploaded to your channel you have the option to share it to multiple different Social Sites right away or you can simple get the code provide and just “copy & paste”!

FREE Hosting! Maybe this is the real secret of YouTube! Other Video Systems charge a pretty penny to host your videos and give you more control and options that YouTube doesn’t. But the numbers don’t lie because none of those other Video Platform come anywhere close to YouTube. You can choose for your uploaded videos to be Public, Private, or even Unlisted.

Grow your audience with related videos! Another cool feature about Social Sites is the ability to share other peoples content and you can do the same thing on YouTube. Most Home Entrepreneurs don’t have the time when first starting their business to create daily content but you really want to establish consistency to keep your audience engaged. You place other peoples content on your own channel and grow your own audience from a portion of other established audiences! Just be sure to always provide value, copying someone else really isn’t cool (besides it will take you forever to recover). Now YouTube even has “cards” to help you establish what your services or value is even better than before. Search “YouTube Cards” in your favorite search platform. The word is still out on how well the work but mark my words, some industrial marketer will figure out a way and market those findings to us all.

The Best Social Site For Marketing – google-plus-icon

Benefits Of The Google Plus Social Site:

Getting started with Google as a Social Platform has a great deal of benefits in the form of access & tools but on a different scope from Facebook. It’s very simple to create a GMail account, which will make things much easier to utilize all that is Google (using the same GMail profile). That’s a good thing for your brand too! Here’s just some of the benefits you can use for your marketing with big G:

Google Drive: Makes it easier to share documents, video’s, checklists, everything else. You know about cloud computing and all that, Google Drive is very similar to having an external drive without carrying one around. Just be picky on what you put on the drive (like you are with everything else online).

Google Talk: Send instant messages & receive them from others on Google. You could keep in touch with your Team, have meetings, and other possibilities.

Google Hangouts: Much like a Webinar or just a Video Conference with multiple users. You get to save your Hangout on YouTube for your continued marketing effort. Takes a little practice but it’s not to difficult to learn and many marketers use Hangouts as a Marketing tool.

Google Plus: The Social place for other like minded folks just like you, groups and sharing value for almost all of the varied niche markets. Being Social on Google Plus will grow your targeted audience (and cultivate leads too!).

YouTube: You already knew that YouTube is part of Google right? What better means of Branding your Business is there when you can place your Logo and Brand all across Google! See above for YouTube’s other benefits.

Your ultimate goal in choosing a Social Site for your Business should be growing your audience and capturing interested people for Traffic & Lead Generation. Did you enjoy this post? I would love to hear from you, just make a comment below this post and I’ll personally respond to you. Want to build a great list of Targeted Leads?

Glenn lives in Colorado Springs, Colorado and has been marketing for 4 years. My biggest goal is to help other marketers end their struggles with my Coaching. Often new marketers don't get the clarity they need and that's what I provide.